What's French for "be careful what you wish for?" Just ask the 19 million
voters who flocked to the straight-talking, populist presidential candidate
Nicolas Sarkozy last spring. Many of them apparently now find themselves
mortified by their president's flashy private life and penchant for talking
trash. Recent surveys show Sarkozy's approval rating falling to new lows of
38%, and pollsters are attributing the decline to voters' spying a vulgarity
in their president incompatible with their standards for the office.
Apparently, Sarkozy isn't getting the message. On the weekend jaws dropped
anew as he publicly insulted an anonymous detractor as a "poor a**hole."

The verbal altercation took place Saturday at France's annual farmers'
congress, where the president was rebuffed during a round of glad-handing by
an older man, who said, "Don't touch me, you make me dirty." Visibly piqued,
Sarkozy twice ordered the man to "bugger off," the second time adding the
insult usually reserved for locker rooms and school yards. Though the
incident took only seconds, the exchange was immortalized on camera and
uploaded to the web site of French daily Le Parisien, where it had been
viewed nearly a million times by Monday morning. Against a background of
sliding poll numbers, the video turned the verbal swipe into a political event.

"He's failing to fulfill the responsibilities he was given," pronounced
Socialist party leader François Hollande, gleefully lecturing Sarkozy  who has promised to restore civic discipline  that a politician "can't
enter into conflict with someone who won't shake your hand." Sarkozy's
conservative backers played the altercation the opposite way. Employment
Minister Xavier Bertrand complained about the inordinate attention the spat
had generated, though noted people "don't have the right to humiliate the
president" with comments he qualified as "hurtful." Agriculture Minister
Michel Barnier also cast his boss as a victim in the affair, saying, "I sense
the French people have had enough of the systematic aggressiveness towards
Nicolas Sarkozy (and) the government."

Where Sarkozy's blunt speech and take-charge manner had earlier won him
cheers, polls suggest that those qualities now strike many French voters as
intemperate, belligerent and undignified. This weekend's incident was not
the first. During a visit last November to a Breton fishing port, one
fisherman's taunts and insults got so under the president's skin that he
dared his heckler to come face him. During his first major press conference
as president in January, Sarkozy took such deep exception to questions from
journalists he considered unfriendly that some of his replies struck
observers as petulant and belittling.

Another former Sarkozy plus now playing out as a negative is his tendency to
aggregate power, often at the expense of cabinet ministers who traditionally
handle day to day governing. Last week Sarkozy surprised a meeting of Jewish
leaders by announcing plans to raise awareness of the Holocaust by requiring
elementary school students to "adopt" the life and death of a child killed
during the Shoah. Had Sarkozy bothered to consult more widely before making
the announcement, he might have avoided the storm of criticism calling the
plan inappropriate and potentially traumatic for such young children. He has
since modified that proposal in the face of polls showing 61% of the French
public hostile to the idea.

But if Sarkozy's style and omnipotence are chilling his relation with French
voters, polls suggest they've been a tonic to his Prime Minister, François
Fillon. The most recent polls show Fillon's popularity surging seven
percentage points to 57%  a record-setting 19% gap between a French
president and his hand-picked prime minister. Fillon was belittled as staid,
wonkish and boring during Sarkozy's glittering first six months in power,
but now he is enjoying a reputation as a solid, industrious executor of
policy who tends to shun the bright lights now trained on the president.
Perhaps there's a lesson there for Sarkozy.